On the Hunt for Objects? Shop Our Book IRL at Nordstrom’s Manhattan Flagship

In our book, How to Live With Objects, we talk a lot about how rewarding it is to slowly and thoughtfully surround yourself with unique objects you feel a connection to, hence why we also caution against the department-store mentality of treating your interior as a series of empty spaces you should fill all at once. But when the department store itself becomes the place to find those unique objects, that advice obviously no longer applies — case in point, our new pop-in inside Nordstrom's midtown Manhattan flagship store, where now through June 17, you can shop nearly 100 truly special handmade, one-of-a-kind, and vintage objects from some of the makers and dealers featured in the book (as well as the actual book).
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16 Incredible Vintage Objects You Should Know From Our Book

When it comes to a visual wow factor, vintage objects reign supreme — they're often the most expressive, unusual, and unexpected, not to mention the most accessible, if you get lucky at a flea market or have time to kill on eBay. As such, a copious amount of real estate in our new book, How to Live With Objects, is devoted to the discussion of how to shop for vintage and what makes a vintage object worth buying, which means that we had plenty of pages to illustrate with images of absolutely incredible bygone designs, from a circa-1900 Swedish candelabra to some epic Postmodern gems. In today's book excerpt, we're spotlighting 16 of the vintage objects we included that, if you didn't already know them, we're sure you'll be pleased to get to know them now.
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Seven Design Tastemakers on Their Biggest eBay Scores — and Secret Expert Shopping Tips

We talk at length in our forthcoming book, How to Live With Objects, about the joys of getting lost in the online shopping process on your way to building a more personal home, and about how shopping, even if you don't buy anything, can help you learn about makers and movements as you define or refine your taste. There's really no better place to do that than eBay. Today, we asked seven tastemakers and shopping experts to share their favorite eBay finds, as well as their top shopping tips and current favorite saved searches (because as every shopping expert will tell you, you *must* have saved searches).
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Adam Stech on Italian Futurism, Part II: The 1930s Ceramics of Mazzotti and Nikolay Diulgheroff

Like many of the best art movements of the early 1900s, the radical Italian Futurist movement was most-known for two-dimensional works, but encompassed the applied arts as well. One of its more interesting — yet largely forgotten — practitioners was the late designer and artist Nikolay Diulgheroff, for whom ceramics became a medium of dynamic expression for his and the Futurists’ ideas.
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See What 7 Top Vintage Dealers Found at This Year’s Brimfield Flea Market

Every year in Brimfield, Massachusetts, dealers get to the famed mile-long flea market at 5AM, flashlights in hand, long before the public is allowed in, and often do this for 5 or 6 days in a row before heading home at the end of the week with trucks full of objects bound for their galleries, Instagrams, and private clients. This year, after getting a personal peek at the Brimfield finds of Lorca Cohen, who co-founded The Window in Los Angeles — that's her epic haul in the photo above — we decided to reach out to a few other top dealers to see if we could show you the market through their eyes.
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Yes, Watches and Clocks Are Still a Thing — Here Are 50 of Our Favorite Designs, Sourced on eBay

By all reasonable logic, watches and clocks should have gone the way of the fax machine, or the VCR. Yet luxury watch sales are at an all-time high, and designers continue to release new wall and table clocks as if the past 20 years never happened. We love coming across amazing watches and clocks when we're shopping, especially for vintage, so we decided to devote a post to cataloguing our favorite examples, sourced from one of our favorite shopping platforms, eBay — which happens to be ground zero for watch lovers.
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A Vintage-Loving Stylist Takes Neutral Hues to a Whole New Level in This Salt Lake City Rental

Stylist Logan Reulet’s hyperminimal, clean-lined, über-serene rental home in Salt Lake City is like a living piece of art, subtly infused with meaning and character. From the crisp ivory bed linens, to the cream Nordic Knots rug, to the miraculously pristine white furnishings — like Urbana’s shapely Centipede Bench, which dominates the living room — not one surface is darker than the soft touch of ecru or the odd coffee tone.
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We Want to Live Inside This Editorial On Conscious Consumerism

As our planet hurtles towards climate oblivion, it seems like literally the least we can do is engage in conscious consumerism. And this editorial — published last month in Elle Decoration UK and conceived collaboratively between London-based photographer Kristy Noble and stylist Katie Phillips — makes a pretty excellent case for it.
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Think Face Pottery Is a Millennial Thing? Meet the Artist Who’s Been Doing It Since the ’70s

When Jill and I posted pictures of our favorite books on Instagram last week, mine featured one of my favorite objects in my living room, shown above: A pot, used by me as a planter, that features two hand-painted, color-blocked pastel faces. I bought it on eBay for $10 a year and a half ago. I don't remember how I found it. I had no idea, at the time, who the maker was, only that her name was Victoria Crowell and I assumed she was an obscure local artisan who made the pot in the '80s. I was mostly correct.
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Week of January 6, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A hip new hotel in San Miguel de Allende, Maarten Baas does dishware, and a Paul Rudolph original gets reissued in all its overly-elaborate glory (above).
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Week of November 11, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Sneak peeks from this weekend's Salon Art + Design Fair and the upcoming Design Miami, new rugs by Martino Gamper and Sigve Knutson, and a look inside a stunning home-turned-design-gallery in Los Angeles.
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